


Titus Accosted

by matrixrefugee



Category: Gormenghast (TV), Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
Genre: Awkward Flirting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-27
Updated: 2019-02-27
Packaged: 2019-11-06 10:21:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17937995
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrixrefugee/pseuds/matrixrefugee
Summary: Irma is restless in her marriage, and feeling that her husband is neglecting her, tries to make him jealous...





	Titus Accosted

**Author's Note:**

> Written for < lj user="fic_promptly">'s [Gormenghast, Titus/Irma Prunesquallor, being forced to dance with Irma at an anniversary party for her and Professor Bellgrove](http://fic-promptly.dreamwidth.org/89871.html?thread=4314895#cmt4314895) Possible AU where Titus either never left Gormenghast or came back after his travels.

"He no longer values me, dear brother, I am most certain of that," Irma Bellgrove, nee Prunesquallor, groused as she walked back and forth on the carpet laid out on the floor of her brother's study, inches from the ordered snarl of papers and books that he called a desk. Her lean form twitched neurasthenically as she turned to return from the far side of the cluttered room. "His head has been turned from me, by some little scullery maid, I am sure of it!"

"Has it occurred to you, my affectionate affliction, that your preoccupied mate might have his thoughts occupied with the academy's papers and bindings?" her brother said, peering over his glasses as he looked up from the case books, laid out on the desk top.

Irma seemed not to heed her brother's suggestions, though she steered her bony hips to his side again."Ten years we have been husband and wife and he does not look upon me as he once gazed upon me. Am I withered too soon that he forgets me so? It has been three whole days since he whispered lovely words to me over breakfast."

"I would worry only if four days had passed since he offered you such tenderness," Prunesquallor murmured, with a smirk of mischief.

Irma emitted a squeal of annoyance and wheeled around to face her brother. "Oh, do not mock my sorrow! Would you taunt me if my husband were on his deathbed?"

"If he was on his deathbed, I would be the one tending to my dear brother in law, seeing that he eventually got up from it," Prunesquallor replied.

"You are impossible to speak to, brother!" Irma snapped and stalked away, lean hips twitching at every step as if her spine had a second joint in it.

An hour later, when Prunesquallor went to the kitchen in search of tea (his servant forgetting to come with it as called), he found Irma more collected, her writing desk at hand, pen applied to paper.

"And what have you found to settle your spirits, my amiable affliction?" he asked.

"I am writing invitations: I shall host an anniversary party, to which the Earl's family and others shall be invited," she replied. "I shall show my delinquent husband that I am still a hostess with whom to be reckoned."

"A delicious trap for a negligent bird," Prunesquallor replied. "I hope that he rises to take the bait."

"And take it he shall," Irma said.

* *

And so, ten days later, found Professor Bellgrove, clad in his battered dinner jacket, mingling among the threadbare elite of Gormenghast. His colleagues in the castle's elite academy clustered about him and the buffet, taking all of his attention along with the food on the tables. His wife hovered about, trying to get his attention, but the moment he got quit of one chatterbox, another came to him to congratulate him on ten years of wedded bliss, effusively, so as to make themself heard over the sawing and tootling of the chamber orchestra that filled the air with their dance melodies made for only the most nimble of dancers.

At length, he realized that his wife had, it would seem, evaporated, and so he managed to divest himself of his latest hanger-on, the better to go in search of his wedded companion.

Irma, in the meantime, infuriated by her husbands lack of attention to her had aimed her hips toward the far end of the hall, where she nearly installed herself on a thin-legged gilt chair to mourn the failure of her party, when she laid eyes on a slim young figure. The young Earl himself, once her husband's student, standing alone, watching the gathering moving about, no one to watch over him, not his Secretary nor his mother. A fine young man like he should already have found a marriage partner of his own, or at the least, taken a sweetheart or a lover. Well, if he had no lover and her own had all but forsaken her, then two lonely hearts should find solace with one another.

And so she strode up to the young Earl, who turned to her, blinking his smoke-colored eyes in surprise. "Madame Bellgrove?" he asked.

"My Lord Titus," she said, curtsying. "Would you honor me with the pleasure of a dance?"

The Earl stared at her as if she had spoken in a foreign tongue. "Madame Bellgrove..." he said. "This is unprecedented."

"No less than your presence at this humble soirée," she said, with another curtsy. "You are the first Earl ever to reply to a common man's wife's invitation."

The young Earl sputtered a reply that only amounted to incomprehensible syllables. Taking this as a reply to the affirmative, she reached out and took his hands, guiding one onto her hip and she clasping the other, she nudged him into the rounds of a waltz.

Over the heads of the proferssors' wives and their daughters -- none of them handsome or pretty -- Bellgrove made out the bobbing form of the plume atop his wife's headdress. At that moment, the crowd parted just so, allowing him to see his wife dancing with the young Earl, the young man looking at her with the eyes of a deer cornered by a tiger. A sight like this would normally have angered him, but he felt more pity for the boy, hauled into the dance by this termagant.

He approached, tapping the young Earl on his shoulder. "My Lord Groan, allow me the honors of dancing with my lady wife?" Bellgrove asked.

The young man looked up at him with relief. "As you wish, Mister Bellgrove," he said, freeing himself from Irma's clinches, who gladly took her husband's hands...


End file.
